For those of you who don’t know, my daughter has Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP for short). This is a very rare genetic disorder that causes her bones to fuse, and any new injury is “healed” with bone, and will eventually turn her into a living statue.
We have a website for her (http://www.cureerinkate.com) running on WordPress. WordPress is fine for a simple blog that gets hits every few minutes or so, but is woefully inadequate for the kind of traffic tha we are now getting. This traffic will only get worse, because Discovery Health is airing an eiposde “Mystery Diagnosis” called “The Girl who Couldn’t Move”, and is about FOP. Erin is included in the show. Here’s the commercial for it:
In addition to this, our website has been one of the most vocal about FOP, so if you do a search, then you’ll likely find our site within Google’s top 10. So…. we have to prepare for this extra traffic.
WordPress was originally meant to be run on Linux, and all of my servers run Windows. There are a few “caching” plugins for WordPress, but none of them work properly on IIS. I need some sort of output caching…
Enter IIS 7. Not only is there an “official” Microsoft URL rewrite module (downloadable from MS), but it has true output caching. Output caching means that IIS will store the complete rendered page, without having to process it. Reports I’ve read show that this caching is just as effective as WordPress’s WP-Super-Cache, which reduced render time down from about 3 seconds down to milliseconds.
So, that’s what I’m doing… I’m installing Server 2008 on one of my spare servers. If it works out, then I’ll eventually put all of the sites on 2008. If only my server’s DVD-drive would work… rawr!
